Slight Doors

He carved slight doors onto the surface of everything

Some led to rooms made of illuminated tanzanite

Some led to toy battles re-enacted across a map of New Jersey

Some led to the gates of improvised ecological preserves

Some doors chose to remain enigmatic and stubbornly refused to open

Another door opened to reveal a museum of fossilized boom boxes   

One fashioned beneath his cat's water bowl

Offered an unobstructed view of Pyxis

He installed a glass door over his showerhead

That allowed him to visit his family in Las Piedras

Soon his life was a convocation of half open doors

They became surrogate kaleidoscopes

Cunning invitations to neon arroyos

Compulsory rock festivals

A plate of asparagus

Blithe anchors

Fixed inward

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News

Metastasis

…And still they came in legions,

platoons of madmen cloaked in velvet

and steel.They startled us out of our dream

life, gently lulled us into a deeper slumber.

To our simple eyes they were spellbinders,

orators,

magicians who thrust

invisible bullets into our

villages. The elders fell like torn

drapery while unnatural light escaped

through the cracks of a glass eye,

pouring shadows into our crock-pots.

The scepter that once stood as our protector

was melted down and made into a satellite

dish. Lifeless remnants of our children were sprinkled

onto their ice cream sundaes. Soon on Sundays

we would put our hands together and sing

of borrowed gods, ring

bells throughout the valley, stuffing

our secret selves inside

incinerators erected along the dark

alleys that swiftly littered our projects.

Orchestras of insects were flattened,

substituted by a cacophony of metal

horns and electric drills,

early morning barrack drills.

Our infinite garden became plastic

plants set on windowsills.

All the while we sit on front stoops,

unimpressed and unaware,

Passing around bottles and cheap

gossip with the smell of sulfur in our hair

until our garments clashed with our accents, our heads

displaced beneath train tracks nailed

down across holy ground. We listen to the distractions

refracted from the mouths of manufactured

martyrs, their tongues serving as the third

rail. Frail and disparate, we follow

digital red herrings out of our homelands

and into an abyss of disposable

idols who levy us to witness

the impalement of our own myths.

Today we wander along predetermined paths,

Unimpressed and Unaware,

While wealthy sycophants construct Byzantine

conversations about chimerical enemies and celebrity

affairs. Transmuted by relentless incantations

transmitted from an iron tower in the hills,   

We whittle away our days scratching

off incessant lottery tickets, waiting for the winning

numbers on the radio...

                  Originally Published in Bordersenses